What really drives this idea today isn't legal theory; it's the political fear that the people of the United States will enact progressive legislation

"The Constitution was written explicitly for one purpose -- to restrain the federal government," Rep. Ron Paul said in 2008.

Bless
his heart. (For those of you who didn't grow up in the South, that
expression in context means, "He means well, but sometimes I just want to
slap him.") Dr. Paul is a likeable and honest person, but he knows as
much about the Constitution as I do about obstetrics--the difference
being that I don't try to instruct the nation on how to deliver babies.

Dr. Paul is far from alone in this bizarre delusion. If
there's anything the far right regards as dogma, it's that the "intent"
of the Constitution was to restrain, inhibit, intimidate, infantilize,
disempower, disembowel, and generally smack Congress and federal
bureaucrats around. "Does anyone seriously believe that when the
Founders gathered in Philadelphia 220 years ago they were aspiring to
control the buying decisions of individual consumers from Washington?"
Sen. Tom Coburn asks.
"They were arguing for the opposite and implored future Courts to slap
down any law from Congress that expanded the Commerce Clause." Sen. Jim
DeMint claims
that "although the Constitution does give some defined powers to the
federal government, it is overwhelmingly a document of limits, and those
limits must be respected."

If this is true, it's the kind of
truth that comes to us only from divine revelation--because it sure
doesn't appear in the text of the Constitution or the history of its
framing. Historically, in fact, it's ludicrously anachronistic, like
claiming that the telescope was invented in 1608 so that people could
watch Apollo 13 land on the moon. There was no federal government to
speak of in 1787. "Congress" was a feckless, ludicrous farce. The
concern that brought delegates to Philadelphia was that, under the
Articles of Confederation, Congress was too weak. Many of the Framers
were close to panic because the Confederation Congress was unable to
levy taxes, pay the nation's debts, live up to its treaty obligations,
regulate commerce, or restrain the greedy, predatory state governments.
The Union seemed on the verge of splitting into tiny republics, which
would quickly be recolonized by Britain, France, or Spain.

As early as 1780, Alexander Hamilton (one of the authors of The Federalist) wrote
to James Duane that "[t]he fundamental defect [in the Articles of
Confederation] is a want of power in Congress. It is hardly worth while
to show in what this consists, as it seems to be universally
acknowledged, or to point out how it has happened, as the only question
is how to remedy it."

In April 1787, James Madison, second author of The Federalist, wrote to
George Washington his aim for a new Constitution: "The national
government should be armed with positive and compleat authority in all
cases which require uniformity." (Madison also wanted a rule that no
state law could take effect until Congress explicitly approved it.)

Shortly before, Washington had written
to John Jay, "I do not conceive we can exist long as a nation, without
having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade the whole Union in as
energetic a manner, as the authority of the different state governments
extends over the several States." Jay, third author of The Federalist,
made clear to Washington his own view:
"What Powers should be granted to the Government so constituted is a
Question which deserves much Thought--I think the more the better--the
States retaining only so much as may be necessary for domestic Purposes;
and all their principal Officers civil and military being commissioned
and removeable by the national Governmt." (Note the last part: State
executives would be appointed by the federal government.)

As for
the Constitution's text, if it was "intended" to limit the federal
government, it sure doesn't say so. Article I § 8, a Homeric catalog of
Congressional power, is the longest and most detailed in the
Constitution. It includes the "Necessary and Proper" Clause, which
delegates to Congress the power "to make all Laws which shall be
necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers,
and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of
the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."

The
Framers' main plan for preventing overreach by the federal government
lay not in coded restrictions on Congress's powers but in the
Constitution's political structure. This is what George Washington
meant when he expressed hope that "a liberal, and energetic
Constitution, well guarded & closely watched, to prevent
incroachments, might restore us to that degree of respectability &
consequence, to which we had a fair claim, & the brightest prospect
of attaining."

The idea was that a bicameral legislature, an
independent executive with the power of veto, and a separation between
legislative and judicial power would channel Congress's broad powers
into constructive channels. State governments would advocate
effectively for their own interests both in Congress and with the
people. That's a very different vision than the current right-wing claim
that the Constitution contains between-the-lines "thou shalt nots"
placing various areas off limits to regulation.

The far-right
argument has the seductive power of any half-truth. Of course there are
limits on Congress's power--they are located in Article I § 9:
Congress, for example, can't pass a "bill of attainder," tax exports, or
grant titles of nobility. In addition, the Bill of Rights explicitly
prevents Congress from limiting freedom of speech, "the right to bear
arms," trial by jury and so forth. But conservatives mean something
different: What they mean is that if something isn't written down in the
Constitution in so many words, the "intent" of the Framers was to keep
Congress from doing it. If Congress wasn't doing it before 1787, it
can't do it now.

The worst insult they can level at a
governmental measure is that it is "unprecedented." Before the Civil
War, conservatives argued that Congress couldn't build roads and canals;
it was unprecedented. After the Civil War, Congress "couldn't"
regulate child labor; it was unprecedented. When the Depression hit,
Congress "couldn't" pass Social Security; it was unprecedented. When
the Civil Rights movement arose, Congress "couldn't" outlaw
discrimination in public accommodations; it was unprecedented. Medicare
was unprecedented; so was the National Environmental Policy Act; so was
the School Lunch program. Today, Congress "can't" enact a health-care
system. We've never had one, so we can't have one.

In fact, the
Constitution itself did the unprecedented. It created a national,
republican government with adequate power to maintain and govern a
strong Union during the unforeseeable events ahead. "Nothing can
therefore be more fallacious, than to infer the extent of any power,
proper to be lodged in the National Government, from an estimate of its
immediate necessities," Hamilton wrote in Federalist 34.
"There ought to be a capacity to provide for future contingencies, as
they may happen; and, as these are illimitable in their nature, it is
impossible safely to limit that capacity." From the record and the text,
that was the "purpose" of the Constitution--to create a government
with adequate power, even under new circumstances, to make the United
States what George Washington, in his final address as Commander of the Continental Army, called "a respectable nation."

The error about the purpose of the Constitution explains the curiously
two-faced nature of far-right "constitutionalism." On the one hand, they
insist that they love the Constitution more than life itself; on the
other, they keep trying to sneak amendments into it to strip Congress of
power over the budget or allow state legislatures to repeal federal
laws. The Constitution they claim to revere actually looks a lot like
the Articles of Confederation.

The
current war on federal power, like the other attacks on its power
throughout history, is really motivated by an entirely realistic fear
that those idiots, the people, will enact progressive legislation. Only
by importing prohibitions on Congress into the Constitution can that
terrible outcome be prevented.

But the more tightly we bind Congress with imaginary chains, the less we, the people, can create a "respectable nation."

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.